21st February 2012 Archive

A NASA-funded team has shot a sensor package, dubbed the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator (MICA), into the heart of a form of aurora borealis to seek clues that could minimize electronic interference from solar storms.

Don’t be confused by the name: it may be seem classy and good-looking but this is a mid-range handset, not a deluxe one. It’s also quite distinctive, which is good at a time when Android handsets are numerous and often me-too copies or unimaginative derivatives.

PhonepayPlus said R&D Media Europe (R&D) and Unavalley BV (Unavalley) misled consumers into entering the competitions through the practice of typosquatting and that those consumers were then charged for receiving text messages in connection with the competitions being run.

It's no longer a question of whether Apple will produce a TV - the so-called 'iTV' - but when. That's the clear conclusion to be drawn from an analysis of TV technology trends provided by DisplaySearch, a market watcher, at Panasonic's 2012 Convention today.

The UK's Met Office needs bigger and better supercomputers if it is to confidently and accurately predict the weather and give emergency services a longer lead time for extreme weather conditions, a government group said today.

Dell's Latitude E6220 is a typical workhorse, designed to be solid, dependable and ever so slightly boring. However, Dell is aiming this compact model more at small businesses rather than large organisations. And the increasing numbers of people who, like myself, are self-employed. A touch of style and being just 1in thin and with a 12.5in display are the giveaways here.

An obviously infringing Pokemon iOS port briefly found its way to number two in the iTunes paid app chart, in the USA, despite having nothing to do with Nintendo and garnering buckets of negative reviews.

Microsoft and University of California San Diego researchers have said flash has a bleak future because smaller and more densely packed circuits on the chips' silicon will make it too slow and unreliable. Enterprise flash cost/bit will stagnate and the cutting edge that is flash will become a blunted blade.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave even less well equipped for the modern age than Fred Flintstone’s, you will have noticed the buzz about something called cloud computing. It comes with a menagerie of buzzwords: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure on demand, hosted apps … We could go on.

A green hardliner has admitted that he passed illegally obtained documents to the DeSmogBlog website, well known for its dubious activist tactics. DeSmogBlog is funded by a convicted criminal, John Lefebvre, and run by a public relations operator named Jim Hoggan who takes money from "green business".

Flaws in the way some of EMC's RSA security division encryption keys are generated are down to a weakness in generating random numbers that's restricted to network devices rather than digital certificates on websites, according to both RSA and cryptographic researchers.

For many startups, getting Series A funding isn't the problem. The problem is using that cash to clear the increasingly high hurdles investors are imposing on early stage startups for the Series B round.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to pack enough processing power into mobile phone form factors, so US researchers are proposing a new scheme: seriously over-spec the processors, but only use their power when it’s needed.

A man accused of hacking into the computers of a former British Army intelligence officer on behalf of a News of the World editor has been named as Philip Campbell Smith, also a former British Army intelligence officer.

While America seriously considers the insane Research Works Act (banning the open publication of publicly-funded research), Australia is moving in the other direction. Its National Health and Medical Research Council has announced that all funded research will be made available to the public starting July.